Submitted by Gael Spivak on September 23, 2024, at 12:11
That's a great question!
Until this standard was published, there were no universally agreed-on principles for creating plain language documents or for determining whether something is in plain language. The ISO Plain Language Standard provides an agreed-on standard that tells people what plain language is and how to create plain language documents. And one benefit of an international standard is that everyone will be working from the same standard.
It summarizes the information you’ve been using (or have seen in other guides) but very likely provides information you are not aware of. I learned some new things when I was on the working group that wrote it. It's a useful tool you can use to quickly assess your work against, making sure you haven’t forgotten any of the dozens of steps you need to go through when writing or editing a document.
Until this standard was published, there were no universally agreed-on principles for creating plain language documents or for determining whether something is in plain language. The ISO Plain Language Standard provides an agreed-on standard that tells people what plain language is and how to create plain language documents. And one benefit of an international standard is that everyone will be working from the same standard.
It summarizes the information you’ve been using (or have seen in other guides) but very likely provides information you are not aware of. I learned some new things when I was on the working group that wrote it. It's a useful tool you can use to quickly assess your work against, making sure you haven’t forgotten any of the dozens of steps you need to go through when writing or editing a document.